Bureau/Legal/Content Ownership

LEGAL · EFFECTIVE MAY 2026

Content Ownership

This is a v1 draft published to enable early-access launch. For production-grade compliance — especially in regulated jurisdictions — review with qualified counsel before scaling. Material updates will be announced via email to all account holders.

1. The short version

You own what you make with Bureau. Topics, scripts, voiceover audio, AI clips, thumbnails, exports — they're yours. We don't claim copyright, we don't watermark your output, we don't restrict commercial use. Two practical caveats apply: AI-generated elements may have copyright limitations under your local law, and third-party stock footage carries the original creator's license. Both are explained below.

2. Your inputs

You retain all rights to anything you provide to Bureau:

  • Topic briefs and prompts.
  • Brand reference images you upload.
  • Custom assets (clips, audio) you upload to override AI generation.
  • Edits you make to scripts, voiceover lines, or subtitle blocks.
  • Any other text or media you submit.

You are responsible for ensuring you have the rights to provide these inputs to us. Don't upload other people's copyrighted images as brand references; don't paste journalism you don't have rights to as topic briefs.

3. Generated output

Bureau's output — the production folder, including the script, voiceover audio, AI-generated clips, thumbnails, subtitles, metadata, and timeline files — is yours to use however you want, including:

  • Commercial monetisation (YouTube ads, sponsorships, Patreon, paid courses, etc.).
  • Modification, remixing, derivative works.
  • Distribution on any platform, in any format.
  • Use in client deliverables, agency work, brand marketing.

We do not claim co-authorship, do not require credit, and do not place watermarks or hidden identifiers on your output.

4. License to Bureau

For Bureau to function we need a narrow, technical license to your inputs and outputs — limited to operating the service. Specifically, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to:

  • Store your inputs and outputs in our infrastructure (Supabase).
  • Transmit your inputs to the third-party AI vendors required to fulfil your generation request (Anthropic, kie.ai, ElevenLabs, etc.).
  • Display your content back to you in the application UI.
  • Generate derivative outputs (e.g. voiceover from your script, thumbnails from your concepts) as you request.

This license terminates when you delete the relevant project or close your account. We do not use this license to train AI models, build public datasets, or generate marketing content from your work.

We may aggregate de-identified, statistical metadata (e.g. "47% of Bureau projects use the documentary format") to inform product development and capacity planning. Aggregate data never reveals individual project content.

5. AI copyright limits

This is the part most platforms gloss over. AI-generated images, video, and audio occupy contested copyright territory. Here is the honest state in 2026:

  • United States. The US Copyright Office has held that purely AI-generated works without sufficient human creative contribution are not copyrightable. Substantial human selection, arrangement, and editing — what you do when you write a topic brief, edit a script, choose between concepts, and assemble the final cut — generally produces a copyrightable work even when it incorporates AI elements.
  • European Union. Similar rules apply. The human-authorship requirement under the Information Society Directive likely excludes purely auto-generated outputs from copyright protection.
  • UK. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has a specific clause for computer-generated works (Section 9(3)), giving authorship to the person who made the arrangements necessary for the creation. This is more protective than the US regime.

Bottom line: treat the script you wrote as fully yours; treat the AI-rendered visuals as protected only to the extent of your creative contribution to them (selection, arrangement, editing). If you publish the raw Bureau output unchanged, you may have weaker copyright protection against unauthorised use than if you do further editing in your NLE.

We are not your lawyer. For high-value commercial use, particularly anything destined for theatrical, broadcast, or premium streaming distribution, consult counsel familiar with AI-content law in the relevant jurisdiction.

6. Third-party content

Pexels stock footage

Stock clips assigned by Bureau's auto-stock feature are sourced from Pexels under the Pexels License: free for personal and commercial use, no attribution required, but the clips themselves remain the intellectual property of the original photographer. You cannot resell the unmodified Pexels clips on their own as stock content. Including them in your edited documentary is fine; uploading them to a competing stock site as your own is not.

AI vendor models

Veo3 (Google), Seedance (ByteDance), Claude (Anthropic), ElevenLabs voices, and Gemini Image are operated by their respective vendors. Their terms govern the underlying generation rights. As of writing, all of these vendors grant generation users the right to commercially use their outputs. We monitor vendor terms and will notify you if any vendor changes their commercial-use policy in a way that affects existing Bureau-generated content.

Music and likeness

Bureau does not include music in its output by default. If you add music in your NLE, you are responsible for licensing. Bureau's voiceover presets are synthesised, royalty-free voices licensed for commercial use through ElevenLabs.

7. Moderation

We may decline to generate content we believe violates our Acceptable Use policy. Bureau also relays content moderation signals from upstream AI vendors — Anthropic, Google, and ElevenLabs may refuse certain prompts on their end, in which case the relevant pipeline step will surface the vendor's rejection to you.

We do not pre-screen or actively monitor user content. We are not responsible for content you produce; you are. If you believe Bureau has been used to produce content that infringes your rights, contact legal@bureau.studio with the details required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure.

8. Attribution

Bureau credit is appreciated but not required. If you want to mention the workflow in your description or end-screen, "Made with Bureau" is the canonical phrasing. We won't enforce this; we just love seeing it.

This page summarises legal positions in plain language. Where a conflict appears between this page and our Terms of Service, the Terms govern.